Whose fault was that? And what does that say about Biden's strategic and tactical thinking? 

Now Biden apparently wants to retcon 2024, at least among aides, family members, and caretakers. In the middle of the Washington Post's attempt to polish the Biden, ahem, legacy, comes this expression of regret over having handed over the reins to his own hand-picked successor:

Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Aides say the president has been careful not to place blame on Harris or her campaign.

Why would anyone blame Harris rather than the man who made it impossible to challenge her? Had Biden simply withdrawn without interfering in a replacement process, Democrats might have chosen to put the nomination up for grabs in a competitive open convention. Her decisive loss resulted directly from that one last incompetent campaign strategy.

I say "might" because even without Biden's insistence on pushing her as the replacement, Kamala Harris was still the path of least resistance. She had a clearer title to the funds already raised for the ticket, although Democrat attorneys would have likely pried those loose quickly. Democrats also feared even more debate on the previous three-plus years of catastrophic incompetence, but perhaps feared even more a very public debate over Biden's incompetence and the cover-up in which Harris participated.

We'll get to Biden's counterfactual in a moment. The response from Democrats is every bit as fatuous as Biden's claim, however:

But many Democrats blame Harris’s loss on Biden’s insistence in staying in the race so long that by the time he withdrew, Harris had little more than three months to campaign. Others contend that Biden undermined his own message by trying to hold onto the presidency rather than pave the way for a younger group of anti-Trump Democrats who could take the country into the future.

“Biden ran on the promise that he was going to be a transitional president, and in effect, have one term before handing it off to another generation,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said. “I think his running again broke that concept — the conceptual underpinning of the theory that he would end the Trump appeal, he would defeat Trumpism and enable a new era.”

Well, whose fault was that? Democrats went so all-in on Biden's re-election that they deliberately cooked the primaries to avoid a competitive primary that would have clarified the matter. Right up to June 27, the Democrat Party line was that Biden was "sharp as a tack," fit for a second term and necessary to "save democracy," and that any suggestion otherwise was the result of "cheap fakes" and Biden's childhood stutter.

Where was Blumenthal during that entire time? Where were any Democrats who now say that Biden shouldn't have run for a second term, or that now admit that Biden was cognitively impaired throughout his presidency? Dean Phillips would certainly like an answer to that question after being practically the only Democrat to declare that the emperor wore no clothes:

Dean Phillips has some regrets. Not about his decision to launch a quixotic primary challenge to President Joe Biden. He stands by that move, which alienated him from his party even as it proved prescient after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump.

But in an exit interview with POLITICO Magazine, the retiring Minnesota Democrat said he wished he had been more successful at fixing what he says is a deeply broken Congress and that he could have delivered more for his constituents. And he made clear he was leaving Capitol Hill extraordinarily frustrated with his party.

“We are totally devoid of leadership. We are rudderless,” he said.

Allow me to provide a clarification: Democrats are totally devoid of legitimate leadership. We still have no idea who's been running the White House over the past four years. It clearly hasn't been Joe Biden, who spent nearly half his time on Rehoboth Beach and a large portion of what remains out of sight and out of reach of the press. Was it Jill Biden? Hunter? The Obamas, or their clique? We may never know, especially with the propaganda industry that is the Protection Racket Media.

So now let's get to the claim in this hagiographic WaPo piece. Would Biden have beaten Trump had he remained on the ticket? Almost certainly not, especially if Biden had to do another debate. One look at the polling before and after June 27 shows that Biden had fallen behind by a significant margin even without accounting for the underestimation of Trump's swing-state strength. Biden hadn't had a lead since October 2023 in the aggregate polling. which is why Biden insisted on trying to bully Trump into an early debate. He'd hoped to use the Manhattan conviction as a debate point to disqualify Trump -- and instead disqualified himself in perhaps the biggest political backfire in modern history, even with that argument explicitly stated in the debate. 

After the debate and especially after Trump got shot in an assassination attempt less than three weeks later, the support for Biden receded significantly. It rebounded slightly just before Biden withdrew, but Biden trailed by three points in the aggregate and only led in one poll in July before his withdrawal -- out of twenty. (There were two ties.) To reverse that, Biden would have to accomplish three four big tasks in 107 days:

• Demonstrate complete competency in extemporaneous conditions
• Campaign at least as vigorously as Trump
• Do another debate in which he remained coherent for 90 minutes
• Provide some defense of his presidency, especially on the border crisis and economics

Does anyone think Biden could have accomplished one of those tasks? Has he done anything since that debate that even approached these goals?  His handpicked replacement managed to sound coherent and competent in the one debate with Trump, which puts Harris one up on her boss. Otherwise, Kamala Harris was just Joe Biden without dementia as an excuse. 

In retrospect, this election was lost the moment Joe Biden handpicked Kamala Harris -- not as the 2024 nominee but as his 2020 running mate. Their combined incompetence, corruption, and malevolent demagoguery single- (or double-)handedly resucitated Trump's electoral prospects and deservedly doomed Democrats for their chicanery over the past four-plus years.